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This year in August our group Deventer Burgerscap will attend the Battle of Wisby event in Sweden, reenacting the famous battle that took place in front of the city walls in 1361. We have chosen this epic event to try and create a proper pike block as it might have looked around 1360-1370. We are gathering a great bunch of people to make this adventure happen, by now we will not only have Dutch such as the small group Baljuw van Heuclum in our ranks but also Germans such as More Majorum and the Blidenbauers and next to that even one or two Swedes. Therefore we need to have at least 20 pikes (but the more the merrier!).
As the text sources and extant pikes indicate that their average length was between 4,5 and 5 meters and their width around 30-35 mm, we bought ash pikeshafts of 30 mm thick and 5 meters in length. The weight of such a shaft is 2474 grams, which is similar to the 5 pounds that Müller-Hickler found in the original ones in the early 20th century. Here is a photo of me holding one of the new shafts, so you can compare it to the 1378 pikemen fresco from Padua (see the earlier blogpost on pikes). Of course the perspectives are somewhat different which influences how long they seem. At the least it is hard to call the Paduan sticks mere spears!

We had great fun playing around with these pikeshafts last Saturday at a training organised by Foundation HEI, where we were first drilled by the sergeant and corporal of the early 17th century living history group MARS and then had the knights of HEI (of which I am one) galop around and through our ranks. It was also a moment for a few of us to try out some of our new mid-late 14th century gear. For me personally it was to see how the new lendenier (a girdle to suspend leg armour), leg armour and breastplate were working, while Marc was testing his new pair of plates and limb armour. Next time I hope to have finished my haubergeon, so I can test my arm harness. The aim is to go to Wisby with two mounted men-at-arms as well!

The next step will be to taper the shafts, at least at their tops, impregnate them, then make the pikeheads and lastly nail them on the shafts. We have decided to forge the pikeheads with the
square cross section, because: 1. they are probably easier to make, 2. they will be more easy to transport on the roof of a car in a big tube, 3. they can be more elegantly turned into versions that are safe to do reenactment battles with: The requirement for these is that they have a rounded point of at least 8 mm thick. A major source of inspiration for our reconstructions are these extant 15th-16th century pikes that originally came from the arsenal of Luzern in Switzerland but were sold to someone in 2007 who then resold them.

Now that we have established (in this blogpost) the fact that pikes were certainly used in the 14th century, we can try to fathom what they looked like in this period.

Text sources

From an entry in the accountbooks of Ghent in Flanders of 1353, we learn that the pike is counted among the langhe wapine (long weapons) next to staves, axes and lances. But the question then remains how long. Also you could ask yourself if possibly the words spear and pike were synonyms for the same weapon? This last question can be answered with a 'No', because in a law from the county of Zeeland of 1290 both spear and pike are mentioned as separate weapons.
This law states that whoever carries een speere of een pieck (a spear or a pike) without a 'spear-iron' (spearhead) of 6 thumbs (6 inches = 15,24 cm) in length, shall have to pay a fine and will have his spear or pike confiscated. The two weapons evidently were very alike, very long sticks that both were equipped with the same kind of spearhead. This means their difference can only be explained by differing lengths.

Luckily we have two sources that prescribe pike lengths. The first can be found in an article by Müller-Hickler from 1906 where he writes that the citizens of Turin in the north of Italy had to have pikes of 18 feet in 1327. The second is a law of 1390 from Bremen in the north of Germany, summing up what armour and weapons the inhabitants of the rural area around the city were obliged to own at all times. It says their pikes should be at least 16 feet tall:

"Every landman in this same Vyland (the municipal rural area around
Bremen) shall have at all times a troyen (protective padded coat), an
iron hat, a pair of gauntlets, a shield, a throwing axe and a pike of
sixteen feet and not shorter, on pain of paying one mark, .... " (Ehmck, 1883)

If
we assume that a medieval foot measured on average 28 centimeters, we can
calculate that 16 feet is about 4,5 meters and 18 feet equals about 5
meters. In comparison, the prescribed pike length for the Burgundian
troops in 1473 was 14 and 16 feet, while the city militia of Utrecht in
1521 had to have 18 feet, just like the length prescribed a hundred
years later in the Dutch Republic. With the above information we now
know that pikes measured in between 4 and 5 meters, but mostly between 4,5 and 5
meters in length, and contained pikeheads of ideally 15 cm in length.

Extant pikes

Because
there are no extant pikes of the 14th century (please let us know, when you know of any), there is the need to look at later specimens to get an idea of what their pikeheads and
shafts might have looked like. When Müller-Hickler wrote his article on pikes in 1906 there were still hundreds of 15th and 16th century ones extant in several town arsenals and museums in the south of Germany and in Switzerland, which he examined. Of course it might be that some of these pikes were older, but were never identified as such because nobody considered them to be 14th century weapons. It is hard to tell without for example carbon-dating the pikeshafts. And even then you might run into the fact that shafts can be replaced during or after the working life of a pike. Pikeheads found through archaeology may often have been dated on the assumption that pikes are a post medieval weapon as well. For instance this pikehead was found in Rotterdam in 1952 and is credited as being a 16th century Spanish infantry pike. But what would make this a Spanish pike and not one produced in the Low Countries, and aren't all pikes infantry weapons anyway? This sort of doubtful identification illustrates that dug up remains of pikes that are said to be post medieval may in some cases be, for example, late medieval. Large scale research into and cataloguing of extant and excavated pikes would help massively in this respect.

Müller-Hickler described in 1906 that the extant pikes he saw were all made of ash, often impregnated, and that an average pike weighed about 5 pounds, so 2,5 kilograms. Their lengths varied between 3,85 and 5,15 meter, but longer than 5 meters was really scarce and the average length of the twenty pikes he measured into detail was 4,65 m. Six of these had an average diameter of 24.7 mm at 10 cm underneath the pikehead, 3 meters from the pikehead the diameter was 35.8 mm on average, and at the bottom it was about 30.3 mm. So they showed a nice taper from thinnest at the top to thick in the middle and thinner at the bottom. With a total length of 4.65 m their point of balance was somewhere around 2.38 m beneath the pikehead, so roughly halfway the shaft.
Further more Müller-Hickler identified two types of pikehead, a flat bladed one and a 'dagger' like head with a square cross-section. The blades of the flat ones were at most 16 cm in length until the top of the shaft, while the blade of the dagger type could measure up to 18 cm until the same point. If only their length until the start of the 'neck' on the pikehead itself was measured, they were respectively 14 and 13 cm in length. The width of the flat ones was 3.5 cm at most while the dagger type blade was 1.8 cm at its thickest. The langets, the strips of steel attached to the pikeheads and running partly down the shaft, measured between 20 and 55 cm in length and about 1.2 cm in width. They were nailed to the shaft with 3 to 6 nails each. Only a very few of the examined pikes had a chape on their bottom, and these were very decorative, probably meaning that a normal pike would have had no chape there.

Five years ago Matthew Kelty posted some of his pike research on the forum of the myArmoury website. Here are the approximate dimensions he found on two 16th century pikes from the Landeszeughaus (arsenal) of Graz in Austria. They come pretty close to the ones found by Müller-Hickler and the ones in the text sources. Another great book on polearms among which pikes, is a book by Waldman.

Pikes (very very long spears) are often associated with the Swiss in the late 15th century and even more with the armies of the Early Modern period. But they were already around in the 13th century and, more important to us, well used in the 14th century. This blogpost shall talk about the general sources we have for this for the region of the Low Countries which, when combined, present a pretty clear-cut case.

Pikes in the 14th century

The pike is a weapon that was used by infantry. It should then be of little surprise that we already find a pike mentioned in 1268 in the accountbooks of the city of Ghent in Flanders, one of the earliest and most densely urbanised regions of Europe, meaning a large potential supply of infantry city militia and a great chance of extant written records. Likewise the chronicle of Melis Stoke of 1301-1305 describes how in 1304 a large number of citizens of Dordrecht (then the most important city in the county of Holland) attacked and chased off an army of the duke of Brabant at Waalwijk. These Dordrecht burghers were armed met pieken ende met staven (with pikes and with staves). A Middle Dutch poem of c. 1340-1360 talks about the common people generally fighting battles with haren piken, met haren bilen (their pikes, with their axes). The Hainault chronicler Froissart mentions picques and goudendas (staves with an iron pin on top) being used by the Flemish city militias at the battle of Cassel in 1328 and he talks about the presence of Hollandois Piquenaires (pikemen from the county of Holland) at the siege of Tournai in 1340. He goes into more detail with his description of an ambush that took place in Flanders in 1380: The city of Ghent had sent out an army of more than a hundred strong, tous piquenaires (all pikemen). They caught their enemies, the lord of Enghien and his knights, by surprise and beat them due to their overwhelming numbers of 10 to 1, but also because of their longues picques.
In 1346 the city militia of Ghent was painted on the walls of the Leugemeete Chapel in that city. When this chapel was demolished over a century ago, luckily drawings were made. Here you can see the part that shows the guild of weavers, armed with godendags / staves with pins on top and what look like spears. Considering the common combination of the use of staves with pikes, and not spears, these depicted spears may well have represented pikes that were not drawn to their full length because of a shortage of space / artistic license.

To the east of the counties of Flanders and Holland, the Westphalian city of Dortmund was at war with the archbishop of Cologne
and the count of Mark in 1388-1389. The city council hired extra soldiers for this purpose: 153 mounted men-at-arms, 27 English
archers and 49 gesellen myt peycken (men with pikes). The archers got paid 5 guilders a
day if they came on horse, 4 when on foot. The pikemen got paid 4 guilders a
day as well. These numbers can be compared to the soldiers that nobleman Jan van Blois, lord of Schoonhoven and Gouda, took with him on two campaigns into the duchy of Guelders. The first one was in 1361. Next to a whole load of mounted men-at-arms he brought 30 archers and 14 piekenaers and he had 16 pikes made for them. In 1372, when he was going to claim the ducal crown of Guelders with an even bigger army, he had "50 pikes prepared, straightened and ironed (put pikeheads on them)": Van 50 pieken te reeden te rechte ende te ijseren. During his campaign in Guelders, provisions for Jan's army were also bought in 'our' Hanseatic city of Deventer, which is situated in the bishopric of Utrecht but close to the border with Guelders. Pikes were not an uncommon sight there either. The city's accountbooks show that in 1357 two of them had 'irons' (pikeheads) put on, and in 1364 a pike was reimbursed that had been lost by a man during his escort of the city councillors to the nearby town of Zutphen:

From the same accountbooks we learn that the Deventer city councillors would go around town to make sure that all the citizens had the proper amount of personal armour at home, according to their wealth, so that they could serve as the city militia in times of war. Alas the exact type and amounts are not known for Deventer, but we can can get an idea from a surviving law of the town of Schiedam from the end of the 14th or early 15th century. It states for example that citizens from the lowest
property class (possessing goods worth up to 24 pounds), should own 'a staff,
or a mace/club or a pike'. Since this lowest class probably made up at least half of the population, the amount of pikemen the town could turn out would have been considerable. We had already encountered this in the 100+ pikemen army of Ghent in 1380.Another visual representation of pikemen has survived in Italy. They are depicted on a fresco in Padua, made by Altichiero da Zevio in 1378, showing the beheading of Saint George.

Pikes in 14th / early 15th century battle
Concerning the way pikes were used in battle we can first have a look at the Chronicles of Jean Froissart again, to be more precise his description of the battle near Kuinre in 1396. Albrecht of Bavaria, count of Holland, Zeeland and Hainault had sailed from Enkhuizen to Kuinre near the border of Frisia with an army of men from all three of his counties. The bonnes villes et gens du pays (good towns and people of these lands), had provided Albrecht with a grand nombre d'arbalétriers et cranequiniers, picquenaires et gens d'armes (great number of crossbowmen, cranequin-crossbowmen, pikemen and men-at-arms). Also some troops from England and France had joined this venture. The Frisians which Albrecht had come to battle and subdue were armed with longues picques and bâtons ferrés but, except for shields, were poorly armoured. They had the vantage point though, standing on and sheltering behind their defensive dike in between two wet moats (this type of defense line is called a landweer) which means that Albrecht's army could not use horses but had to fight on foot.
The army was ordered in a line, the trumpets were sounded and it advanced. The troops from Holland had cleverly made ponts de lances et de piques (bridges of lances and pikes) to cross the first moat. In the ensueing battle many daring attacks were made, with grand poussis de lances et de piques (great pushes of lances and pikes). Only when the Hainaulters had found a passage over the landweer somewhere further along, where they able to outflank the Frisians and could Albrecht's army defeat them. It is interesting to note that the term 'push of pike' was still used in the 17th century to describe fights between pike blocks, suggesting that the way they were used in battle had not changed that much either.

The advantage of having pikes (spears of 4,5 to 5 meters long: food for the next blogpost) is that you can form up a line of battle which is a few ranks deep where the second, third and fourth ranks can still join the fight at the front because of the length of their weapons reaching over the ranks in front of them. A pike block should be tightly packed together to make sure no enemy can pass between the pikes. This also means that in case of emergency the deeper ranks can do with less armour than the men in the front line. This, and the main target area, are described in a chronicle of the bishopric of Münster: In 1407 a mounted army of two nobles and their retinues from Cleves invaded the said bishopric near Gescher. Local lord Hynrick van Gemen quickly gathered his soldiers and huesluden (farmers) on foot and marched towards them. Having arrived at Gescher and ordered his men into battle he told them:

The 'Wisby Project'
All these sources combined have made us at Deventer Burgerscap decide that we should aim to form a proper pike block (that does not target faces...). We have picked the Battle of Wisby reenactment event in August 2016 to realize this. Of which, and of the measurements of pikes, I will speak in the next blogpost.